Discord Solution - Department of Informatics

How to create and use course specific Discord servers

To better communicate and share ideas with and among students we utilize Discord. Discord is a free voice, video, and text chat app that is used by tens of millions of people to talk and hang out with their communities.

During the pandemic some lecturers at the deparment of informatics started using Discord to digitally communicate with students. Since then the practice has stayed and is now the main information channel for the introductory courses INF100, INF101 and INF102 for several semesters.

In addition to course specific Discord servers the department of informatics has their own official server for employees. The students have their own unofficial Discord server.

Previous years course specific Discord channels (incomplete list):

Set up a Discord server for your course

Video explaining how to setup server and use the discord bot (16min).

To create a server you must be logged into Discord and have Discord downloaded.

To create a Discord server for a course use this template: Server Template. Simply click the link and name your server appropriately, for instance "INF101v22". You now have a working server.

Channels and Categories

The server template creates a server with the following categories (headers) and channels (bullet points). Each channel has pre assigned roles for "Foreleser", "Undervisningsassistent" and "Gruppeleder".

General

welcome-and-rules: Give a welcome to the students and specify any rules you want to impose on them.
announcements: Post announcements for all students to see. Only those with "Foreleser" and "Undervisningsassistent" role can post here.
off-topic: Off topic conversations, jokes, fun facts and memes. Meant to strengthen the social aspect of the course.
general: Any messages/questions/statements from both students and staff.
technical-help: Questions and help for technical difficulties, such as GIT or IDE problems.

Admin

lecturers: Channel for lecturers to talk among themselves (if more than one lecturer).
tutors: Main channel for lecture-group leader communication.
backend: Discussions about technical solutions and coding assignment creation. Channel only for "Foreleser" and "Undervisningsassistent" role.
labs: Links to assignments posted to the group leaders before publishing to the students on MittUiB.
bot_commands: Channel for writing bot commands. Bot commands work in other channels as well, but using this channel avoids populating other channels unnecessarily with commands.

Assignments

Channels for each lab assignment and compulsory assignment. Having a specific channel for questions about an assignment we have found to be rather benificial to the students and avoids a lot of duplicate questions.

Infy - our Discord bot

A Discord bot is a means to add features and automate procesess in a Discord server. Our bot, Infy, helps us to setup and maintain our course specific Discord servers.

What can Infy do?

The main objective of Infy is to further automate the setup of a course specific Discord server. When using a template to create a server (as the one above) we are restricted on what can be included. To manage how exactly your server will look we have added some commands to automate this.

Add Infy to your server

NOTE: The bot will only work for servers created with the server template provided in the setup section.

To add the bot to your server make sure you are logged into your Discord user in the current browser and click on this link. Then select the server which you want to add the bot to. Note that you must have administrator rights to the server to add a bot.

Authorize the bot with all options ticked and do the reCAPTCHA. Give Infy the role "bot". Simply click on Infy in the right column and click the + sign and choose "bot".

Bot Commands

Command	Description	Usage
info	Get link to this Wiki	`$info`
help	Get list of all bot commands	`$help`
create group	Create text channel for group	`$create_group [group number]`
create groups	Create text channels for sveral group. `$create_groups 1 5` yields 5 groups: group1, group2, ..., group5	`$create_groups [from] [to]`
create category group	Create category with channels for group	`$create_category_group [group number]`
create category groups	Create category with channels for several group. `$create_category_groups 1 5` yields 5 groups: GROUP1, GROUP2, ..., GROUP5 each with a text channel and the possibility to add more at need.	`$create_category_groups [from] [to]`
select language	Change the language of all channels. Only supports norwegian and english. Only works for channels given by the server template.	`$select_language [language]`
exam mode	Create channel exam_questions and lock all other public channels.	`$exam_mode [on/off]`